License impact of opencore-amr and vo-aacenc/amrwbenc

[Sebastian Dröge]

On Mi, 2012-02-08 at 12:39 +0100, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to discuss an issue with you that I have not yet fully 
> understood. It is about the opencore-amr and vo-aacenc/amrwbenc 
> packages, which are licensed under the Apache-2.0 license and which 
> apparently has an impact on the licenses of the software linking 
> against them.
> 
> AFAIUI the GPL-2 is not compatible with the Apache-2.0 license, but 
> the GPL-3 is. This means, for all software which is released under the 
> terms of GPL-2+ the GPL-3 has to apply once it is linked against a 
> library licensed under Apache-2.0, such as the ones mentioned before.
> 
> Well, in Debian gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad is linked against vo-aacenc 
> and vo-amrwbenc and gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly is linked against 
> opencore-amr, but according to their respective debian/copyright 
> files, the packages are still released under the terms of the GPL-2+. 
> Is this simply an oversight and should get changed to GPL-3?
> 
> [...]
> 
> Please enlighten me!

Not sure if this situation is that simple. First of all, is the LGPL2
compatible with the Apache license? If it is there should be no problem,
almost all GStreamer plugins are LGPL2+, including these two.

Then the situation here is a bit more difficult because it's only the
vo-aacenc/amrwbenc plugins, which link against the Apache licensed
library. Ideally, this shouldn't affect any of the other plugins inside
the package as there's no relation between them. And actual "linking"
with applications only happens at runtime if the plugins in question are
actually loaded.


What do you think should be done here for
gst-plugins-bad/gst-plugins-ugly? For libavcodec this situation is a lot
simpler because it's just a library and not something with dynamically
loaded plugins.
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